A Blog of Thank You (Gracias Ergo Sum)

This blog hasn't been a vehicle for much. I never used it to prove much more than I appear to exist, and never gave much to qualify that. There was very little poetry, by myself or anyone, published on this blog. I don't know if I ever had specific intentions for it. Every so often, I felt like saying thank you. Most of the entries going back are thank yous, often to poets and artists I've never met. But also thank you to performers, poets, and friends, and to performances themselves, a few of them performances I participated in. While I know I exist (I have first-hand evidence), if, as is conceptually possible, this blog connects me to people to whom I have never met, then I give them inference of my existence, second-order confirmation. And that inferential confirmation is often in the form of a thank you.

But it's been a while since I've given a thank you through this blog, far too long. I have a lot to be thankful for. I'm not going to list it all. I got to spend last week with a number of people that I very rarely spend any time with, or less- that is to say I met a lot of great folks last week and had a lot of great experiences.

So I want to say thank you to Kyle Schlesinger for driving nine-hundred and ninety-five miles with me, from Lawrence, Kansas to Oklahoma City and Norman, Oklahoma, and to Fayetteville, Arkansas. I'd like to thank Kyle for reading from The Do How with me on the four occasions that we did. It was a real pleasure, and somehow I think those readings add something to the work itself. Our collaboration now exists in an additional dimension, or two.

I would like to express gratitude to the poetry (and extended) community of Lawrence that welcomed me: Jim McCrary, Megan Kaminski, Sue Ashline, Nick Smith, Joe Harrington, and all the poets and audience who attended our reading. Not to forget our reading companion Siobhán Scarry. I was so impressed by the energy of Lawrence and the ability of the organizers there to work without enforcing the poet-political boundaries that seem to structure communities so often.

Thank you to the poets and poetry enthusiasts of Norman, Oklahoma and Norman North High School. Professor Crag Hill gave Kyle and I the initial impetus of taking our tour of the Midwest through the Southern Plains to Mid-Southern United States. Crag was also, with Laurie Schneider and Noemi, our host. His generosity fits in pretty well with the generosity and enthusiasm we met giving two creative workshops on collaboration at Norman North High School. The kids blew my mind with their energy and insight into writing, poetry, collaboration, and poetry communities. Professor Jonathan Stalling was an amazing force to encounter as well. Any serious poet would do well to check out the Mark Allen Everett poetry series Crag and Jonathan co-host, for the audience they might bring as well as the conversation that will follow. Thank you Scott Pierce and Kathleen for coming to the reading and the day meandering Oklahoma City. Come to Portland.

After all that, the reading in Fayetteville could have not turned out and I would still have felt the romp around the country was a success. Not so: Fayetteville offered us something near a full house, an energetic audience, and a half-dozen gracious hosts. Thank you to the operators of Back Space (thank you), the lovely Matt Henriksen and Adele (thank you), and C. Violet Eaton and Sara Nicholson, both of whom read with us and allowed Kyle and I to stay with them our last night away from home (thank you and thank you and thank you and thank you, each particular and essential).

You help me realize who I am. Thanks again!

In the place
Of coalesce we're
Sometimes offered song

At Linda Austin's
The broken basketball
Hoop is trembling

Existence with objects
Built for us
To do what

YOU CAN HAV YUR FK'N CTY BAK

I traded Adam at DL a poem composed in exchange for a/the new (?) edition of UKANHAVYRFUCKINCITY BAK. D.A. LEVY A TRIBUTE TO THE MAN AN ANTHOLOGY OF HIS POETRY

 I believe I first read Levy in my sister's copy of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and shortly thereafter bought Mike Golden's anthology of levy's poetry and collage- The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle. I was also recently given the White Wall of Sound edition of d.a.'s Cleveland Undercovers & know I've seen a few other recent editions/collections (one of which is newly printed for $50).

UKANHAVYRFUCKINCITY BAK. is a fitting document of a poet who will be forever peripheral to the academic mausoleum and a saint to natal poet punks trying to come alive in boring cities. The introduction by d.a.'s soul-brother rjs is less decipherable than the rest of the book, both in terms of the print and his spelling. 90% or better of this book is a second or third generation generation xerox of the original mimeograph edition. Crazy-sexy and deteriorating.

Somewhere, prior to my discovering levy, I recall being momentarily whelmed by the Sonic Youth levytribute (of sorts) NYC Ghosts & Flowers. I don't think any of us thought it was that great a SY record(though did William S. Burroughs also do the cover art?) the lyrics were certainly Levite, revealing a familial resemblance that could be generational, terrestrial, or both.

The contents of UKANHAVYRFUCKINCITY BAK. is also peppered with collaborations, poems in tribute to levy, "essays," by second-cousins such as bpNichol. It makes me imagine- what if levy had gotten to Canada! He'd probably be Prime Minister by now and talking down the Kootenai School of Writing, palling aaround with Michael Ondaatje. It's sometimes difficult to see who wrote what in this book. That fact, coupled with the introduction, typescrawled in its disappearing script are twin aporias that add a peculiarly Levite to the form of the book itself.

What did the Phoenix do between ending life as Harry Crosby in 1929 and touching down as levy in 1942?

Four books from mIEKAL aND's Xexoxial Editions/Xerox Sutra

The other day I received in the mail four books published by Xexoxial Editions, a state-run imprint of the Autonomous Republic of Qazingulaza. Four books: of fracture, a collaboration by Buffalonian Robin F. Brox and mIEKAL aND (prefect of Qazingulaza); Xerolage 51: graphemachine by SFer Lily Robert-Foley; Xerolage 50: Three Sequences by the late Bob Cobbing; and The Elimination Considerati by mIEKAL aND.

I feel that these are four distinct modes I will try to describe succinctly. A hypothetical translation, from the unreadable to the more familiar. A translation of another kind, from the familiar to the sculptural, diagrammatic, concrete, visual. Unfamiliar plays of shape and light and darkness, presented as (perhaps) language sequences. And language blown and distorted to examine the qualities of the edges of words.

As such, they all seem to have different, but related, pivots. Changes. And different kinds.

Of Fracture. This collaboration between Brox and aND takes an older book length poetic sequence called factura by Langpo fungimentalist and conservative radio antennae Bruce Andrews, and twists it, visually, from things resembling words, transforming it into a poetic sequence more intelligible than the original, while maintaining its original, concrete, shape.

To explain Andrews' factura a bit more, it's written in "Near English" as I would put it. Words and word parts suggestive of language you might know, but never with an obvious word it "should" be, and as such without any concrete meaning. So then of fracture is something akin to a homophonic translation, taking words we know (for the most part) and putting them in the places of Andrews' Near English. There may be more to the constraint used by aND and Brox but this is how it appears to me. I attempted a similar project some years ago. I made a poem of book-length by taking Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez, which is also composed of words and word parts, and "staring" another text out of it. It makes little sense perhaps but I was attempting something I have been calling "translation by Rorschach." I would suspect similar projects have been undertaken by other poets (and I would like to see them. Commentators suggest there is nothing new under the sun. In my poem, Dawn's Erasure, the language seemed to be a blend of the recent/familiar and the repressed, with a fair amount of "other" thrown in. In this sense the language "of translation" is coming from the "back of the head" and the "bottom of the guts." What's interesting to me is this kind of translation being done as a collaboration-where are the guts? Are they shared, manufactured, both?

In graphemachine, the 51st installment of Xerolage (a serial devoted to xerography, collage, concrete & visual poetry) we have another kind of translation. Interpretation might be a better word. This time there is a personal language, of self description (i.e. "Lily needs a boyfriend of any kind") used as the source material. In graphemachine, the author takes the source and breaks up the language into diagrams, often reminiscent of Jackson Mac Low's "vocabulary gathas," resemblant of ancient (1960s) vispo.
These are then transformed, in series, into things like architectural diagrams, board games, paper jewelry, cubist bookshelves. All of these executed in a graceful and soft dark pencil and/or pen. I hope she sends me something for the newsletter (if anyone reading this knows her, tell her how, or give me her address).

I probably don't need to say too much about Bob Cobbing or mIEKAL aND. I'll say this: Three Sequences is the best reproduction of his visual poetry, and maybe the most interesting work of his, period, I have seen. But I haven't gotten to see that much. And I'm told there is a lot a lot out there. What I gather from the introduction (which, in Xerolage, always appear at the back) is that the format of Three Sequences is closer to the format he generally worked in. These are the furthest in this package of books from any convention of language. The other book of mIEKAL's, The Elimination Considerati is similar to the Cobbing in that its interest is the plays of disintegration and light, etc, but here with language as a still-apparent source material. Both of these books (email me if I'm wrong) are vispo of a time and style of which a fair amount exists: xerox, or ditto-based. However, I'm not sure an anthology of Xerox (or ditto)-based vispo does, or any otherwise collection. It seems to be underrepresented in the Last Vispo, though the scope of that anthology falls on a later time period. Are there collections of vispoetry from the photocopier? Doesn't mIEKAL live in a museum of just this?

13 Hats in 12 x 16

The Next Big Thing

My partner in rooming and doffing, Jen Coleman, has tagged me in a series of cryptic chainletters. It involves answering a series of questions revolving around a hypothetical, but unnamed "book," which I will pretend is referring to my forthcoming chapbook "10th Spectral Cannon," published by Hank's Original Loose Gravel (hanksoriginal.com).  

What is the working title of the book? 10th Spectral Cannon

 Where did the idea come from for the book? It's a section of a larger book, which is technically untitled but always gets called Spectral Cannon. 

 What genre does your book fall under? Colorful poetry.

 What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie
 rendition? Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers as an ampersand. Leo Daedalus as Ron Silliman. Richard Froude as all of the orange sentences. Homer Simpson's voice as the person talking about the dragonfly. Jen Coleman as the tongue-in-cheek sentences. That guy from Tron as Jeff Diteman.

 What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? Supercritical bottleneck.

 How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? As a formalist, that is hopelessly complicated.

 Who or what inspired you to write this book? I had a dream where I thought I could write all these sentences in different colors, and then if I wrote them again in yet different colors they would say something different entirely. I thought it was a Ron Silliman thing. It was. He needs to acknowledge this.

 What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? It's designed by Morgan Ritter. She is a famous artist. 

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? Jim McCrary is no ordinary agency.

 My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:  Crag Hill, Morgan Ritter, Paul Maziar, Chris Ashby, Sam Lohmann.

My Day Workshop at Portland Art Museum

James Yeary and Nate Orton will be teaching a drawing and writing workshop at the Portland Art Museum on Sunday, January 6th. Contact multnomahartscenter.org or 503.823.2787 to sign up...

Join fellow writers and artists inside the Portland Art Museum. Enjoy a day of writing, drawing, and exploring the museum’s riches. Find inspiration in the surroundings and the sculptures, vessels, and jewelry that make up the Body Beautiful exhibit along with the permanent collection. We’ll plan to meet again to create a self-published book from work produced this day. 
Museum admission of $20 is not included. 
385142 Sun. 11:00 am - 4:00 pm Jan. 6 $37 [1 class] 
Nate Orton & James Yeary

Meet in the museum café.

David Abel and James Yeary present an Evening Made of Words (for John Cage)

VISPO

(image by antic-ham)

Fantagraphics has just released the advance copies of Crag Hill & Nico Vassilakis' anthology: The Last Vispo: 1998-2008 (it's called something like that). Nothing of its kind has been published, neither in size, nor quality. It is a huge volume, in something like five sections, amounting to sub-categories (or categorical possibilities) of visual poetry, alongside over two-dozen essays by different practitioners of visual poetry and viewer-readers alike.

It is a strange volume. It includes sculpture, drawing, typewriter art, digital art, photography (found and otherwise), and various kinds of collage. Presumably, the artists within all believe that their work fits into the "movement" known as visual poetry, but it is not a simple question: what is it that unites these works? Certainly there is a tendency to the celebration, perhaps, or the exploration, of letter-forms, and I think of this tendency as something inherited from the practice of Bob Cobbing as well as the Canadian concrete poetry movement (not to say such practice was non-existent prior), and this practice of the letter-form may be the main, though not the only thrust of visual poetry at this moment. But there is much work in the anthology that falls outside of this rickety convention. So much can be found in the section labeled "collage," as well as scattered other work, that, to me, resembles abstract expressionism, and may lack letter-forms entirely. Much of editor Crag Hill's own work as a visual poet (though not included in this anthology) takes textual sources and visually manipulates them into what would improperly be called abstractions, as they are really developments, akin to Bob Cobbing's stretching, twisting, and warping of letter-forms. Then there are those like Bob Grumman, who use the visual structure of mathematics to suggest a new syntax.

Without any intention to insult I would suggest that many of these visual poets are coming from beneath established art conventions. As Geof Huth has said (I'm paraphrasing): "visual poets are artists who can't really draw, and poets who can't really write." though I'm not sure I agree with that.

Of the many centers of visual poetry, the one that is most interesting to me is the letter-figure that splits off from language, invoking the primal act of scrawled symbolism that somewhere and how inspired written language. But there are many other possibilities, and many other actualities. New possibilities for syntax, abstract expressionism in new media, post-literacy sign-painting, post-literature nature worship, vocal choreography, neo-Patchenism, and of course, zaum, which never gets old. All of these in some sense can be found in The Last Vispo, and it may be as well worth noting that most if not all of these ideas are working in between or across different media, sticking to the etymological fore of modern poetry that is: "MAKE IT NEW." The program os visual poetry has put everything in the fire, the heating of the heart at art's center.

LET THEM READ CAKE

generations generating

How did I come to find you? Barrie? Can you hear me?

It's not just the works of the fixed stars in my constellation that I would keep track of, it's also my relationship to them (it's the astronomy and the astrology), but I'm not sure where bpNichol came in. It seems that it may have been in the first package of Score magazine that Crag sent me, it may have been the Emmett Williams anthology. I'm not sure. I remember that I stumbled on the Martyrology in Powell's, and bought books 1 & 2 (which is one book), and I was confused by the clearly elucidated language, the modest but significant emotional introspection, which pivots between an eye (an I) on the saints, a thin veil peopling a self's landscape. I was confused because I was looking for the most out there work, and had found it in his concrete- or maybe that's not right. I found the most out there, experimental work that made complete sense to me, that touched on things new, and also touched me, talking about the visual and concrete work. And then, finding the Martyrology, and being shocked by the openness and honesty of the poem (is it ok to like this?). In spite of these disconcerting thoughts, I read through the book pretty fast. One or two sittings.
Then came across the sound poems somewhere. Probably watched Crag sing "What is a poem" before I met him, and that may have been my first bite. Also disconcerting (how sweet!). But it was the works he first published as Aleph Unit that I think asked me to keep coming back (and read the Martyrology). The Aleph Unit visual poems bridge concrete poetry and comic illustration, taking letter forms and making a nexus of the images that compose the sequence, within the individual images as well as across the sequence. You also find some of the first breaks with the concrete tradition as Crag would define it (a verbal/visual score that can be pronounced, performed). In the Aleph Unit and other series the gesture of making the letter forms becomes the arena, and this makes bp not the first, but certainly some of the first recognizable work to mark the transition from "proper" "concrete" to the very gesture-defined and defying generation of visual poets at work now. Go Canada!
I have a new ritual of picking up another section of the Martyrology from Open Books whenever I'm in Seattle. I read 3&4 (most of it) taking the train back last year, and picked up 5 a few weeks ago. Book 5 of The Martyrology is going to be trickier for me to read in completion because its structure allows one to take different paths through the book. I gave it one terrific reading (in one sitting) and it was fantastic, absolutely beautiful. I can't imagine giving another reading of it and competing, but I am having as much trouble putting the book back on the shelf.
Derek Beaulieu of No Press just sent me a chapbook version he has republished of Lungs: A Draft, which is a part of bp's Selected Organs autobiographical sections. I believe the Selected Organs are going to be re-published themselves again soon. I'll quote Paul Dutton's blurb on the back of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader: "Read him! Read him! Read him!" 

Hugo Ball as John Madden Punds Bloomsday on The Late Now

photography by Richard Schemmererer

New eChap by Crag Hill

http://tipchapknifebook.blogspot.com/2012/05/crag-hill.html

Nothing to be done.

photo by Julia Peattie

TIP OF THE KNIFE

An on-line magazine of visual art and poetry that can be found here

End of the suburbs

LIMINAL PRESENTS GERTRUDE STEIN

Thursday March 22nd-Saturday March 24th an otherwise empty studio space (supplied by a friendly and generous design firm called HAPPYLUCKY) held one of the most interesting and memorable multimedia events I have had the chance to be a part of: Liminal presents Gertrude Stein.

I didn't arrive in Portland in time to be clued in to the activities the great post-theatre company years ago, and the stories I've heard about the often multi-room theatrical happenings have left me wondering if there is anything more to do. A Theory of Love from 2007 is a legend, indeed I have nostalgia for this play on plays I never got to experience.

So you can imagine I was thrilled to hear that John Berendzen was re-adopting the Liminal banner to put on a tribute to the idiom-defying Gertrude Stein. I saw hints of what was going on at the Dadashop Salon a year ago, as John wrote a Steinian text across the floor of a salon in a line. Though I don't know the nature of that text's transformation into the events of last weekend.

Liminal presents Gertrude Stein included two multimedia installations, one by Liminal founder Bryan Markovitz and Ben Purdy, the other by sound designer Doug Theriault and video artist Stephen Miller. Doug and Stephen set up a rather chill lounge, featuring a minimal 60-minute soundtrack by Doug over a looping six-minute video by Miller. A voice reading from Gertrude Stein's plays guided a woman, again and again, through a portal, before becoming a shadow (if a rather shapely one). Across the hall, Bryan and Ben's installation and take on The Making of Americans paired some incredible ink drawings (whose process I'm told is equally intriguing) with video and audio narration. The video component mirrored the grammar of The Making of Americans, creating new images by arranging a vocabulary of sources, as Stein's text tells its complicated story with its own limited and repeating vocabulary.

The first of the two major performances was Virgil Thompson's Capital Capitals. Virgil Thompson was a contemporary of Stein whose work has been largely forgotten. The vocal performance, for four male vocalists is humorous, with enough physical nuance of gesture between the four performers to be really quite entertaining. But the amazing paper wigs by Jenny Ampersand, brought it to the level of sculpture, and on top of all that (literally- I think) Anna & Leo Daedalus video projected a tour through a city made entirely of paper, both from the perspective of sculpture and video making Capital Capitals a stunning, multifaceted, and unforgettable work.

Camille Cettina & John Berendzen brought a collaboration of durational composition and attention. One Dancing, likely the most difficult for some audience members, was probably also the most moving for others. At least literally. I may have my numbers wrong, but I believe there were six dancers and six vocalists, this time all female. One Dancing is the name of -I believe- a longer play by Stein, that features a very repetitive-seeming, but never actually repeating text, set to music by John Berendzen, primarily just in the voices of its chorus, though occasionally sliding and transforming into minimal electronic passages that seemlessly moves between the choral phrasings. All the while the dancers moved slowly among the audience, as there was no real distinction between dance-floor and auditorium. The dancers at various points would interact with the architecture, columns and walls, would sometimes disappear to center attention on one or more of the dancers, or at least you might think so, until you turned around.

One Dancing ran longer than an average feature-length film, and I believe may have been better appreciated by those who occasionally left the room for a drink or a breather, not necessarily because it was too much to take in, but maybe because the appreciation of the durational element may be better with some punctuation. At any rate, I have to mention the effect of the singers who surrounded the auditorium and dance-floor, projecting their voices from all sides, is something that most definitely made you need to be in the room to appreciate it. For me, having seen in the last few weeks two performances by Morton Feldman (one being his four-hour String Quartet II), I felt Berendzen's musical accomplishment fit in perfectly for me with those. This one all the more enjoyable to me in its mutability of art and idiom, positioned between dance, music, literature, theatre.

I can't forget to mention the readings of early work provided by the peripatetic David Abel, who broadcast from a wireless microphone before during and after Capital Capitals and One Dancing. I don't know if I know a reading voice I prefer to hear more, and I've certainly heard others say the same.

If you were there and feel I've left something out, remember I was tending bar almost the entirety of all three nights, and this is what I've been able to put together from when I could sneak away. Hopefully that says something for how impressive the weekend was.

OUTSIDE THE IDIOM

Last night I went to the release party at Floating World Comics for this book, D.I.Y. Magic, by Anthony Alvarado. The book, as a project, began as a series of articles for the now-defunct (but fucking legendary!) Arthur Magazine. I was way into Arthur Magazine back when I was skipping classes at the University of Idaho. Arthur blew me away by 1.) being free 2.) having a column where Thurston Moore reviewed noise records, and 3.) having these articles on the multifaceted metapharmacospiritualist and Occult underground. The latter was actually of huge importance to me, but I did find it interesting.

Flash forward a few years (I graduated?), and shortly after I meet Anthony he tells me he's been writing articles for Arthur Magazine (I'm like, "there's still an Arthur Magazine?" he sez, "yeah, online"). That was probably one of my first important small world moments.

So anyway, Arthur is gone again, but Anthony continued writing these really interesting articles on magic, and not so much "Magick," as "magic" in quotes. Articles on "magic," in quotes because the magicians include people like neo-Luddite philosopher John Zerzan. So, yes, this book is a sort of philosophical re-contextualization of magic as ways of being. We think that's cool.

I don't think when Anthony asked me for an interview for the book I was thinking about this history of his writing (and I really knew nothing of the book itself). He asked to interview me about the idea of the flaneur, and I actually thought I was resisting his questioning by talking about aura when he asked me about walking. Reverse psychology? I played right into your hands, Anton...

Two things really excite me about this book that might not be a given. One is that it is not a book by and for poets in any way, and my component is no exception to that. The circle of poetry and poetry readers is way too small for all that I love it, and it is really exciting to think that all these comics people and neo-Luddite people and Magickshuns might enter I a dialogue with me that would never happen otherwise, especially at something like a poetry reading.

The other thing is that I'm in a book with Ron Rege Jr! (Mom! I'm in a book with Ron Rege Jr!) Okay, neither you nor my Mom knows who Ron Rege Jr is, probably (yet), but Rachel Hays does, and... what else is amazing about this book is that each chapter is illustrated by one or more amazing illustrators, many from the world of underground and experimental comics: Aiden Koch, Patrick Murphy, Dunja Jankovich, Ian MacEwan, and about 15 others- it's incredible, beautiful stuff. It's many different worlds come together-it's MAGIC.

PAY ATTENTION TO INTERESTING PEOPLE

Pay attention to Adam & Kate at Division Leap